Photo of one of the Stonehenge excavations (I think from one of Tim Darvill's digs) showing a mass of boulders generally interpreted as packing stones. Where are they from? How should we interpret their shapes? How did they get here?
It's funny how some of the posts on this blog attract hundreds of views and scores of comments, and some attract none at all. Here is one that had zero comments:
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2010/04/where-did-packing-stones-and-mauls-come.html
The Stonehenge debris (packing stones, mauls and hammer stones, and flakes and other bits and pieces in the debitage) has been ignored by most of the archaeologists writing about Stonehenge, and geologists haven't shown much interest in it either, except for those bits loosely referred to as "bluestone". It's almost as if there is a conspiracy of silence.
To repeat what I said before:
In the excavations of Gowland and Hawley early in the twentieth century, they recorded 447 mauls and hammerstones, mostly in pit fillings, which had been used for the shaping of the sarsens. The tooling marks on the surface of the great monoliths are still visible. Some of the tools were made of a very hard type of sarsen which is densely cemented by microcrystalline silica, and which was therefore a tough and resistant tool. Other packing materials are more intriguing, since they are made (according to William Hawley) of Jurassic oolitic ragstone and glauconitic sandstone. Rock of the former type was supposed to have come from near Chilmark, around 20 km to the south-west of Stonehenge, in the Vale of Wardour. The latter was supposed to have come from the Upper Greensand beds in the same area. Dr Green thinks that these stones were collected there and carried to Stonehenge in a separate “stone collection” exercise. However, that is a matter of debate, and nobody has seriously questioned Hawley’s suggested provenances for the stones. These rock types also outcrop to the west, in the western part of Wiltshire and in Somerset, and Geoffrey Kellaway pointed out in 1971 that they could have reached the Stonehenge area as glacial erratics. The Upper Greensand outcrops around Warminster, about 22 km to the west -- not far, as it happens, from the site of Boles Barrow. Also, it is doubtful that these two stone types would have had any value as hammerstones, since they are generally too soft and only become hard when impregnated with calcium carbonate, for example by being placed in a chalk pit. Would piles of these soft sandstone and limestone rocks have been fetched all the way from the Vale of Wardour just to be used for stabilising standing stones in their sockets? That seems very doubtful to me.
One of the Atkinson photos of a large packing stone being moved during one of the Stonehenge excavations. Not a maul or a hammer stone. And why would anybody want to fetch a stone like this from far away, just to pack into a sarsen or bluestone socket?
I have not been able to find any systematic studies of all this extraneous material, and the only sound consideration of it seems to be in the big tome by Ros Cleal et al called "Stonehenge in its landscape". Here and there in the text there are mentions of packing stones and rubble, and finds of the following rock types are recorded: limestone, quartzite, Greensand sandstone, chert, mudstone, conglomerate, slate and shales. But nowhere do the authors go into the question of "Where have these rocks come from?". Furthermore, if you look through the text, in diagram after diagram and photo after photo we see that the quantity of extraneous stone is truly remarkable, including many hundreds of skull-sized cobbles and larger boulders, lying in sedimentary layers and used as packing stones, mauls or hammerstones -- or otherwise just ignored.
The only article which does recognize the importance of the "other stones" is this one, written in 2019 by Katy Whittaker:
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/02/flights-of-fantasy-re-stonehenge-stones.html
In the article she does recognize the importance of Chilmark stone and some of the other sedimentary packing stones, and she does speculate as to where the stones might have come from, recognizing that they could well have come from the west. But the article falls flat on its face because if its defective central assumption -- namely that glacial transport of any stones from the west was impossible, because Chris Green and one or two others have said so. So, says Katy, the packing stones must have been gathered up or quarried from distant outcrops by human beings who were motivated by exactly the same spiritual / ritual / mystical beliefs as those who moved the sarsen and bluestone monoliths. In other words, the rocks represented in the packing stone assemblage must have been deemed "special' in some way, and so the collecting and transporting of them must have had a deep meaning. So instead of discussing the packing stone issue rationally, she displays confirmation bias and resorts to yet more myth making.
So there has just been a blithe assumption on the part of virtually all Stonehenge writers that this material must have been "imported" or fetched by the Stonehenge builders. But that now appears nonsensical. Why would the builders go all the way to the nearest outcrops of Greensand, Chilmark Stone, Oolitic ragstone etc just to fetch rubble or packing stones? It makes no sense, whatever Katie Whitaker may say. They MUST have used whatever was at hand -- and that was a mottley collection of stones of all shapes, sizes and lithologies. All of these exotic materials, and the bulk of the debitage / Stonehenge layer must have been present in the neighbourhood long before the builders of Stonehenge started work on their stone monument. They can only have been carried here by the ice of the Irish Sea Glacier, coming in from the west.
And if anybody says to me "Ah, but these foreign stones only occur in the "right" places and in the "right" layers, showing that they must have been carried in at the same time as the bluestones and sarsens" I will remind them of one of the great Stonehenge bits of circular reasoning. As I have pointed out before on this blog, it is assumed over and again that the presence of foreign stones in certain layers is associated with "the arrival of the stones." In other words, the erratic material is used as a means of dating these layers. That's all upsidse down and back to front. What these erratics in sediments mark is the beginning of the stone construction phase. Cleal et all go into mental gymnastics in several places in their text where they try to explain away foreign stones and fragments in locations that are "too early" and hence very inconvenient. The erratic material was present in the Stonehenge landscape almost half a million years before the bluestones and sarsens started to be erected. This material, like the monoliths themselves, was already there, on the surface and in the ground, unexploited and unloved. Can anybody prove that I am wrong in this?
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Excellent. Have shared this via Facebook. There MUST be some unbiased knowledgeable people out there willing to pick up your baton and run with it......
In your post of 6 April 2010, you say: "For a start, we might expect erratics of Upper Greensand, Corallian, Portland beds (Upper Oolite),
Middle and Lowe Oolite beds (including some limestones and some sandstones), Upper Triassic
beds (marls, sandstones, conglomerates), Carboniferous Limestone (from the Mendips) and even
Coal Measures (mostly sandstones and shales, with interspersed coal-bearing beds). There are
also a few outcrops of Old Red Sandstone on the flanks of the Mendips, to the west of Bristol and
along the North Devon Coast -- and a few small exposures of igneous rocks too. ... There are lots of all these rocks at Stonehenge."
If this is the case, it's hard to see how they could all have got there any other way than by glacial transport.
Yes, I did deal with this issue back in 2010, in referring especially to the fragments in the debitage that have been listed by Bevins and Ixer and also by earlier researchers at Stonehenge including Ros Cleal et al. This was my old post:
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2010/04/stonehenge-local-bluestones-from-west.html.
I have been trying to find out for years whether anybody can say with certainty where the fragments and bigger lumps of soft sedimentaries (marl, limestone, sandstone, shale etc) have come from, but I fear it is just ASSUMED that they have come from the S or SW simply because there are handy quarries there nowadays. Much more likely, as you say, that they have come from the west, and that it was ice that did the collecting and transporting......
Ros Cleal ought to read this Post - I was a NT Volunteer at Alexander Keiller Museum and I respect her commitment to her life's work.
Hi Gang!
Except for those very few oddball stones Brian mentions -- whose provenance I can scarcely address -- the vast majority of recovered tools and packing stones are sarsen.
It seems clear, to me at least, that these hefty chunks wouldn't have been toted separately from the source-fields, but are the by-product of stone dressing. Several of the big boys are clearly scaled down from original sizes, with the most prominent example being fallen Stone-55, which must have had at least half its mass removed.
Additionally, who knows how tall each was when erected before being sculpted down to a common height. While there are a large number of small sarsen chips to be found in the so-called 'Stonehenge Layer', it seems probable that the bigger chunks would have been fashioned into hammerstones or what not -- then used for packing after the upright was installed. Being among the hardest rocks in the world it seems logical to assume that the same material would be used for shaping.
Very economical.
Neil
Thanks Neil -- yes, I agree with you that most of these chunks are made of sarsen. Some of them will be knock-offs from larger sarsens used as standing monoliths or lintels, but others look like natural boulders which have come from a sarsen litter. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to suggest that the location of Stonehenge was determined by the abundance of stone of all shapes and sizes -- and that this stone was then used (like the non-sarsen litter) for all sorts of purposes -- monoliths, packing stones, hammer stones and mauls.
" The Stonehenge Landscape: Analysing the Stonehenge World Heritage Site ", 2015 (2017) from Historic England: I recently got one at the Visitor Centre. Plenty of stuff in it about the likelihood that sarsen stone was available in the near vicinity of Stonehenge.
" since Inigo Jones first proposed that the sarsens of Stonehenge had been brought from the Marlborough Downs the idea has often been challenged but has proved remarkably resilient. The evidence for the presence of large sarsen blocks closer to Stonehenge, slight though it is, should be considered..... " [page 40].
Yes, David Field once published a rather spectacular artists' impression of Stonehenge prior to the construction of the monument -- a landscape littered with debris and boulders of all shapes and sizes. I covered it on this blog at the time. He seems to have got a lot of flak from the Stonehenge establishment for disturbing the accepted narrative!
Page 42 of the above - quoted Historic England 2017 revised book has Figure 3.10, showing Hollows near Stonehenge Bottom. " These, and other similar depressions, so not appear to be artificial and are likely to be solution hollows, which may have contained sarsen blocks." There are two shown within 100 metres of the Stonehenge Visitor Centre and car park, for example.
The authors of aforesaid book are Bowden, Soutar, Field & Barber.
Have today popped in to Wiltshire Museum and seen in its Prehistoric Gallery a maul/ packing stone excavated at Stonehenge. Quite a fearsome-looking beast! As Aubrey Burl commented, no health and safety regulations existed back in the good? old days of yore.
As I intended, I delivered a copy of your 2018 book, "The Stonehenge Bluestones" which is going to be safely deposited into the Museum Library by Jane Schon, the librarian/ archivist.
Thank you Tony -- that's very kind. I bet they will hide it away somewhere, and then forget where they have put it. The best option would be for it to be banned or burned, with the press and TV in attendance, and then everybody will want to read it........
Some of the things labelled as mauls are over 60 lbs in weight! That's pretty preposterous -- how do you manhandle a thing of that size and weight, just to bash bits off a sarsen monolith? The problem that the establishment model for Stonehenge has is that it cannot accommodate "inconvenient boulders"........... and it assumes they were brought in from far away with some specific purpose in mind -- ie to be used as "tools"......
I fear that a rather more flexible model is required.........
From memory, I believe a large percentage of the boulders/ mauls/ packing stones are stored at Salisbury Museum. Salisbury is only around 10 miles from Stonehenge, whereas the Wiltshire Museum at Devizes is roughly twice that distance.
As regards the depositing of your 2018 Stonehenge Bluestones book today, as an ex - librarian I fervently trust it will be respectfully stored in the Museum's Library and that decent attempts will be made to draw its presence to Members of the Society and also its many visitors and researchers.
Separately, I had already encouraged the Wiltshire History Centre at Chippenham (close to the M4 corridor) to purchase 2 copies from you, one for use by the archaeologists who work in that building, the other so visitors, students and researchers have access to a copy. Similarly, Wiltshire Libraries obtained several copies for the general public libraries.
Let's thank God that we do not yet live in a Stalinist state, where book censorship is rife. Instead, sceptical views are permitted - that is, if we are able to still deposit books AND nowadays Blogs into excellent libraries such as the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth!
Another thought - I bet our future King, Charles, all these years Prince of Wales, would read your book, if presented to him. Didn't he read Archaeology as part of his degree?
Now that's a thought -- perhaps I should invite him to come and do an official opening for my museum, in the presence of local celebrities, and I can present him with a signed copy of my book. Must get my PR manager to look into it......
Charles has certainly ruffled many feathers to do with his opinion on architecture over the decades, hasn't he? Well, architectural design was certainly involved at Stonehenge, including e.g. the bluestones horseshoe ..........He also did one academic term's study at Aberystwyth as part of his Cambridge degree. May even know a bit of Welsh.....we'd love him to ruffle some of the feathers of the various "ruling hypothesis" squeaking Ostriches whose heads are firmly in the boggy terrain in parts of Preseli.
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